Your favorite author might be among those participating in the Hogarth Shakespeare series. Modern authors, the likes of Anne Tyler (A Spool of Blue Thread) and Margaret Atwood (The Heart Goes Last), are re-telling Shakespeare plays in novels. Starting with the premise of the original stories, the authors have brought their own unique styles to plays such as Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear, re-imagining these timeless tales for modern audiences. According to the Hogarth Shakespeare website, even Gillian Flynn (author of immensely popular Gone Girl) is getting in on the project, though her most-likely brooding and suspenseful spin on Hamlet isn’t due out for several years.
The latest release of the project, Vinegar Girl by Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Tyler, is due out at the end of June. After the popularity of Tyler’s last novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, this novel promises to be another success!
While you wait for this new release, check out the other two books in the series:
The Gap of Time
The Winter's Tale is one of Shakespeare's "late plays." It tells the story of a king whose jealousy results in the banishment of his baby daughter and the death of his beautiful wife. His daughter is found and brought up by a shepherd on the Bohemian coast, but through a series of extraordinary events, father and daughter, and eventually mother too, are reunited. In Jeanette Winterson's cover version of The Winter's Tale, we move from London to a storm-ravaged American city called New Bohemia.
Shylock is My Name: the Merchant of Venice Retold
In this provocative and profound interpretation of The Merchant of Venice, Shylock is juxtaposed against his present-day counterpart in the character of art dealer and conflicted father Simon Strulovitch. With characteristic irony, Jacobson presents Shylock as a man of incisive wit and passion, concerned still with questions of identity, parenthood, anti-Semitism and revenge. While Strulovich struggles to reconcile himself to his daughter Beatrice's "betrayal" of her family and heritage - as she is carried away by the excitement of Manchester high society, and into the arms of a footballer notorious for giving a Nazi salute on the field - Shylock alternates grief for his beloved wife with rage against his own daughter's rejection of her Jewish upbringing.
